ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini suffer simultaneous outages

All major AI chatbot platforms experienced simultaneous outages Thursday morning, disrupting services for thousands of users across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and Grok before providers restored functionality by early afternoon.

The widespread disruption began around 11 a.m. ET, according to user reports on DownDetector. The simultaneous nature of the outages affecting OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and xAI platforms marked an unusual event in the AI services landscape.

Service restoration timeline

By 12:24 p.m. ET, user error reports began declining across monitoring platforms, with some users reporting restored access. Anthropic confirmed full restoration of Claude services at 4:16 p.m. UTC (12:16 p.m. ET), stating the outage stemmed from an infrastructure issue that affected Claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and the Claude API.

OpenAI's status page indicated "degraded performance" through the early afternoon, with the company stating it had "applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery." By 1:37 p.m. ET, all AI service providers appeared to have restored functionality.

Anthropic's status monitor showed multiple Claude models affected during the outage, including Mythos/Fable 5.1, Mythos/Fable 5, Opus 5, Opus 4.8, and Opus 4.6. OpenAI reported elevated errors across both ChatGPT and its Codex system.

Why it matters

While individual AI platform outages occur periodically and typically resolve quickly, simultaneous disruptions across competing providers are highly unusual. The coordinated timing raises questions about shared infrastructure dependencies in the AI services ecosystem that could represent systemic vulnerabilities. As enterprises increasingly rely on AI chatbots for business-critical operations, understanding these interdependencies becomes essential for risk management and continuity planning.

The cause of the multi-platform outage remains undisclosed. Anthropic attributed Claude's disruption to an infrastructure issue but did not elaborate on whether this infrastructure was shared with other providers or if the timing was coincidental.

The incident underscores the concentration of AI services on potentially shared backend systems, even as the platforms compete in the market. For organizations building AI into their workflows, the outage serves as a reminder to consider redundancy strategies and fallback options when mission-critical operations depend on these services.

Mashable first reported the outages and subsequent restoration of services throughout Thursday.